Power wire is bare metal. With a charged battery or a working solar panel behind it, three things go wrong.

All of them need power: a run with nothing charged on it is harmless.

A wire joined back to itself, any closed loop of power wire (even a 2x2 square), is a short. It fizzes and smokes, catches fire, and burns through after a few seconds, draining a quarter of the stored energy every second until it does.

Run power as lines and branches, never loops.

Plain wire touching water electrifies it: anything swimming within about six blocks is hurt every second, and the batteries drain fast.

Use waterproof wire anywhere near water. It never gets wet, though it can still short.

An open end of plain wire out in the rain sparks, drawing as much as a transmitting HF radio, and zaps anything that touches it, drawing six times that for a second.

End every run at a device, keep it under a roof, or use waterproof wire.

A large battery catches fire from fire or lava beside it, a flint and steel, or lightning striking power wire that runs to it.

Once it is alight nothing puts it out. It burns until it is used up, setting fire around it and spreading to the batteries it touches.

Water against a burning battery holds the flames down: it hisses and steams, and stops spreading fire. It is still burning inside and keeps being used up. Take the water away before it is gone and it flares up again.

A battery that burns out in a group of four or more touching batteries explodes, harder the bigger the bank, and sets the rest of the bank alight. Some of those explosions start fires.

Keep banks small, keep them away from anything that burns, and keep fire and lava well away from them.

Antennas stand tall in the open, and in a thunderstorm they draw lightning: now and then a strike that would have landed nearby hits the highest antenna instead. A lightning rod draws strikes from much further, and always wins.

The surge comes down the coax. It burns out the coax at the antenna and some of the rest of the run, blows every radio on it (SWR protection does not help), and sometimes sets the batteries those radios run on alight.

A lightning arrestor on the coax will stop it, once there is one.

Run coax to a lightning rod and it works as a very basic VHF antenna: a poor match (SWR 6) and a quarter of a J-pole's range. Fine for listening in a pinch.

Of course, it is still a lightning rod.

• Put a real lightning rod higher than your antennas and away from the station.
• Keep power wire away from where strikes land: a strike near power wire sets its batteries alight.
• Keep spare coax and a spare radio.